Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The article is devoted to such important historical and cultural source of the Buryatian Old Believers as marginalia on books and manuscripts. The source for the analysis are the results of expeditions in 2018-2019 to Tarbagatai, Mukhorshibir districts of the Republic of Buryatia and Ulan-Ude city. Field studies were carried out in frames of the project “The unique heritage preservation: manuscripts and books in private collections of Old Believers in Transbaikalia” supported by the Endangered Archives Program (EAP) of the British Library with ARCADIA Foundation support. However, the main work objective was to search, identify and digitalize the Old Believer’s personal archives and libraries, a detailed analysis considering certain aspects of the revealed manuscripts was possible only later, as a part of an ongoing study of the Old Believer book heritage in the region. The analysis included 73 books and manuscripts from 5 Old Believer’s collections. The author notes a significant amount of empirical data and the initial level of classification of records on books in the previous period; represents newly identified proprietary, scribal, memorial, narrative and other marginalities in 22 books. They contain information about the ways of forming family collections (inheritance, buying and selling, donating), and existing book memorialia of various groups. Marginalia allow personifying the book-written tradition of Buryatia, revealing the geography of interpersonal relationships, clarifying the circle and reading possibilities of Buryatian Semeiskie. The paper concludes on the necessity to study systematically records in the context of the diverse research topics of Russian history and culture.